In the space of a week two email exchanges ended with my correspondent saying practically the same thing. "Don't write him off," they said of two different English novelists. "He may yet pull a Roth." It was both a lamentation for an author's sad decline and a vain hope for a barely credible return to form. In the modern novel Philip Roth's case is unique. No one has come in from the cold in quite the way Roth did in the mid-90s. Or at least that's the official critical line.

The fact is that Roth has always been a maddeningly erratic writer. The sequence of novels that began with Sabbath's Theatre in 1995 and ended with 2000's The Human Stain are books of howling rage and bitter elegy – genuine works of art. But they were not without precedent, even when Roth's career was commercially and critically in dire straits. The Counterlife in 1987, for example, may well be his best book. What critics feasted on was that most hateful of modern expression his "journey": the bad boy of letters, now realising his potential and becoming the greatest living American novelist. The second coming of Roth was as much predicated on the literary community's surprise that he had bucked the established writerly trajectory – an early establishing period, a peak in middle age, terminal decline – as it was on the undoubted quality of his work.

Roth was, however, not quite of pensionable age when he wrote Sabbath's Theatre, and just 64 when he wrote his late masterpiece, American Pastoral. With the generation of Barnes, Amis and McEwan all approaching the same age, it doesn't now feel old at all. Roth may well have stood alone in the 90s, but perhaps his later phase will prove inspirational for other writers. Maybe they actually will pull a Roth.

Over drinks to celebrate the launch of The London Word festival, some friends and I bandied around names of the authors most likely to deliver something that eclipsed their earlier work – or at least arrested its decline. Martin Amis was the immediate answer, though those who had read the new book were less convinced. Ian McEwan was mentioned more in hope than expectation, while a suggestion of Irvine Welsh just skewed the debate to whether Trainspotting was actually any good in the first place.

My two nominations were based on recent reading. Will Self's lecture on Sebald struck me as a change in pace. It reminded me of the richness of his sentences, his erudition and passion – qualities which are dotted around in his fiction but have yet to settle in one novel for any sustained length of time. His burgeoning interest in psychogeography also suggests that his fiction may yet broaden from grotesque satires into something more heartfelt and meditative.

This kind of progression is present, too, in the new work that appears in Hanif Kureishi's Collected Stories. Each one is compressed, stark and strangely compelling; there's a feeling of progression here that his last novel, Something to Tell You, sorely lacked. In that book you sort of knew what was coming next; with these stories that simply isn't the case. It'll be interesting to see whether this trajectory continues – and whether he, or Self, or anyone else, can follow Roth's late blooming.